Rant Cast: Wii U Preliminary Rant

The Wii U is launching tomorrow and I’m sure there’s already a mob of you lining up outside of GameStops and what nots to go and grab your console tonight at Midnight. Fortunatley, and unfortunately for me I got mine at a GameStop inside of a shopping mall and they aren’t doing a midnight launch. Yay for sleep, boo hoo for no midnight Wii U. Then again though, I have been dissapointed with all of the shenanigoats Nintendo has been pulling in regards to their new console.

Take for instance the most recent news that the Tvii function will not be available at launch. I heard that and went WTF, this was one of the main reasons I was purchasing the Wii U and Nintendo says it’s not ready yet. I feel it’s really getting to the point to where developers and console makers just want to get their product pushed as fast as possible and don’t care if everything is ready yet. Watch, in 40 years when the XBOX 9000/PS50/Wii *(#@ comes out the console(s) will launch with support for only one game, will work half the time, and we’ll have to wait five months for all the neat features the company promised. All I’m saying is that I payed 300 dollars for a console and about half of it only works for now.

Another thing that grinds my gears is the storage. To start off, every time someone says “You’ll be getting X amount of storage with this device” you’re really getting less than that. 32 GB of storage is actually 29.XXX GB of storage. But after that you don’t have to worry about anything other than what you put on your device taking up storage. But not with Nintendo. Oh no dear listeners. If you pre-ordered the 8 GB Wii U, after the system update on launch day and making a user profile you will have around 3 GB of storage left of your 8 GB. Wait, what?! That’s right, 3 GB. The curse and blessing of this dilemna though is that your Wii U will be able to read an external hard drive with up to 2 TB of storage. The curse is that you have to shell out about $100 more on top of your $300 console AND the total price of the games you buy. So you’re looking at around $400 + if you want to buy games from the eShop. Same goes for the Deluxe Version, with 32 GB of storage, you’ll have more storage leftover and will be able to download a couple current gen games from the eShop, but you will eventually have to buy that external hard drive.

Finally, the one thing that gets me the most and didn’t hit me until the other day when I got my copy of Assassin’s Creed 3 for the Wii U from GameStop is that Nintendo is HIDING things about the console. We don’t know the exact specs of the Wii U only that it has an IBM Power based multiple core processor and an AMD Radeon based High Definition GPU. Hell we didn’t even know about the above things I mentioned until THIS WEEK, the week before the launch of the Wii U. As for the Assassin’s Creed 3 bit: I opened up the case to find the dics and the instruction manual. Normally I just poke around the instruction manual just for the hell of it. This time was no different, I opened it up and was surprised at what I saw. Black and white lettering, and only one black and white picture. To some of you, this may not seem dramatic, but to me it was an eye opener. Usually, from what I’ve seen, instruction manuals are a somewhat thick pamphlet with lots of color and pictures of in game stuff. This one only had one picture depicting how you can tell if you guards are chasing you or not. So Nintendo is either trying to hide something or they are NOT confident with the release of this console. They’ve made so many promises, are any of them even true?

I will be doing a preliminary review of the console tomorrow which will be up in the evening PST. We’ll see if Nintendo’s claims are truth or just plain old lies.